The French military on Jan. 15 stepped up its campaign against Islamist fighters in Mali, sending in additional troops. At the same time, a multinational logistics supply line for soon-to-be deployed French, Malian and West African forces was reinforced. The moves show that France is preparing itself for a wide range of scenarios in its fight against al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Paris is also sending a clear signal that it expects the African nations set to contribute to operations to follow France’s lead and assist in the effort.

Y esta su conclusión final:

The jihadists have reportedly abandoned most of their positions in the major urban areas of Azawad. The rebels left Timbuktu and Kidal during the night (as they did Gao earlier). Rather than present a concentrated and visible target for the French air force, the rebel strategy is likely to avoid a direct fight against superior firepower, relying instead on insurgent tactics against the French and their allies when and if they proceed into northern Mali.

El 16, François Heisbourg nos advertía en un tuit de un análisis suyo que ese mismo día publicaba el New York Times en sus páginas de opinión con el título «France to the rescue», fechado el 15. Although the future course of the fighting is laden with risks, skillful diplomacy can turn it into a major opportunity in the struggle against international terrorism, advertía.

Y añadía: The French intervention was prompted by the combined offensive towards Bamako, the capital of Mali, of the three jihadi organizations which seized control of the northern half of the country last year. This unforeseen attack prompted the president of Mali to ask France for immediate help.

Politics: Mali was regarded as a model of African democracy until military seized power in March 2012. Tuareg rebels declared the independence of ‘Azawad state’ in the north, which was quickly taken over by al-Qaeda allies

Economy: Mali is among the 25 poorest countries. It is highly dependant on gold mining and agricultural exports such as cotton

International: The West African Ecowas group and Mali agree military force to recapture the north from Islamist extremists, with UN backing.

For President Francois Hollande – and indeed for the whole of France – it is a different world this week after the decision to go to war in Africa.The president has become a new kind of leader.The abiding criticism of Mr Hollande has been that he is soft and overly consensual.But the rapidity of the move against the jihadists in Mali – and the green light to the failed rescue mission in Somalia – have revealed a man capable of bold and dangerous decisions.Not for the first time, foreign intervention has helped re-forge the image of a president who was floundering in the polls.

A las pocas horas de la intervención francesa, el 11 de enero, Joshua Keating publicaba un breve comentario, Mali and the return of Françafrique, en Foreign Policy, con mapas, background básico y referncias bibliográficas útiles para contextualizar los hechos en el marco de la presencia de Francia en el continente africano. Destaco, sobre todo, en el artículo las citas del nuevo FP ebook We Never Knew Exactly Where, which features vivid firsthand Peter Chilson’s accounts of his travels in the very areas where internationally backed government forces are now clashing with Islamist militants, also revisits France’s role in Mali’s history, looking at how colonialism shaped the region’s political geography and led to many of its current problems:

TO UNDERSTAND THE BROADER picture of Mali’s problems, it helps to look back to 1904, when the French organized 1.8 million square miles of rainforest, savanna, and desert — and some 10 million people — into eight colonies. The French dreamed of exploiting mineral and agricultural wealth by building a railroad from the Mediterranean Sea south across the Sahara into its sub-Saharan territories. Little stood in France’s way. Its great competitor, Britain, showed scant interest in colonizing the Sahara. So France went ahead and defined its colonies on paper, proverbial lines in the sand crisscrossing West Africa. The French redrew the lines countless times, dividing land according to stability and wealth but never carefully verifying the borders on the ground. Those colonies are now countries. Here they are, including their colonial names: Benin (formerly Dahomey) Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) Guinea Ivory Coast Mali (formerly French Sudan) Mauritania Niger Senegal.

Y añade:

From Dakar, Senegal’s capital, the French ran the colonies as one block called l’Afrique-occidentale française, or AOF. On maps, the French shuffled and reshuffled West Africa in chunks big and small. They even used scissors. Take, for instance, the colony of Upper Volta, whose territory was reorganized and parceled out to Niger, French Sudan, and Ivory Coast a total of seven times. The French made the last change in 1947, establishing the borders that still frame independent Burkina Faso, which shares a 600-mile border with Mali. To add to the confusion, the French never planned for the independence of their African colonies, which means they poorly marked the ground between colonies that bordered each other. They drew the lines on paper without keeping track of the changes, as if they were writing a sloppy epic novel. Much of that paperwork is now lost. Even a 1963 U.S. State Department study of «boundaries in former French Africa» warns that «almost every local and French map is at variance on detail.

As France continues operations against militant Islamist groups in Mali, North Africa has emerged as another front in the Global War on Terror. The transformation of Mali into a safe haven for terrorists is a threat to regional and international security. The task for the Malians, French, regional states, and international community is demanding, as the portion of country that is now under al-Qaeda-aligned extremist and Tuareg nationalist control is the size of Texas, and the nation’s democracy has been disrupted since the spring 2012 coup and ouster of President Amadou Toumani Toure. The Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is monitoring the developing situation in Mali, and believes the following op-eds and blog posts will be helpful as U.S. policymakers and lawmakers deliberate how best to respond to the crisis in Mali.